A BOY racer has been jailed for his part in a pile-up at an illegal street cruise in Nuneaton that put ten people in hospital.

Shaun Jackson was racing at 60mph in a 30mph zone when his car clipped a Ford Fiesta coming the other way.

The Fiesta collided with several parked cars and ploughed into a crowd of people watching by the side of the road.

Two women inside the Fiesta were seriously injured.

One suffered multiple fractures while the second suffered spent ten days in a critical care unit with bleeding on her brain, a broken leg and a punctured lung.

Eight other people, including Jackson, were also injured in the crash on the Bermuda Industrial Estate, in Nuneaton, in July, 2008.

Jackson, aged 22, of Rose Cottage Flats, Upper Eastern Green Lane, Coventry, was last year given an eight-week suspended prison sentence and ordered to complete 250 hours of unpaid work after he admitted dangerous driving.

But at Coventry Crown Court yesterday he admitted breaching the order by failing to turn up for two unpaid work sessions on December 20 and January 17, and completing just part of another on January 24.

Jackson claimed his newborn son had been poorly on the first two occasions and that he himself had swine flu on the third.

He submitted a handwritten and photocopied doctor’s note as proof of his illness, but retracted it on the advice of his barrister after the judge raised suspicions over its authenticity.

Jailing him for seven of the eight weeks, and revoking the community order, Judge Peter Ross said: “You have been given many opportunities to undertake this work.

"There is little mitigation other than the time you have already worked.”

The original incident happened at the junction of St George’s Way and Gresham Road, in Nuneaton, where 1,000 cars and 2,000 people had gathered to watch an illegal street race, involving modified cars and motorbikes, organised by unofficial group Time To Cruise.

As the rider of a Honda 900cc motorbike performed a wheelie, the bike clipped the back of the Fiesta which then collided with Jackson’s car coming the other way.

The 21-year-old Honda rider, from Burton-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, was last year jailed for six months and banned from driving for two years.

It is thought the racers had moved on to the Bermuda site after campaigners got them booted off the Hams Hall Business Park, near Coleshill, in 2007.